The continuous development of the Internet has affected a variety of aspects of the society. The existence of various kinds of electronic services, virtual resources, etc., brought about exchanges of virtual properties. In order to conduct a virtual property transaction, conventional currency is first needed. Due to geographic differences, the earliest virtual property transactions are conducted in the same locale in which the buyer and seller arrive at the same place at the same time for the buyer to deliver conventional currency to the seller. The seller then delivers the virtual currency and equipment to the buyer in the game. Later, remittance became the primary payment method. Both these methods use cash as a payment method when conducting a virtual property transaction. However, in terms of both convenience of the payment and the security of the transaction, these transaction payment methods have failed to satisfy the increasing needs of virtual property transactions.
Therefore, the Internet urgently needed a special currency to satisfy its development, and in response, virtual currency was created which is only circulated on the Internet but can exchange for real currency. Because virtual currency also needs to be stored in an account, the issue of charging a virtual currency account arises.
At the present time, companies such as SNDA, NetEase, Sina.com, Sohu.com and QQ.com have all rolled out their own virtual currency, and allow a user to make a one-time purchase of the virtual currency to charge the user's account, and subsequently use virtual currency to pay for a purchase. This has avoided the inconvenience and high cost of issuing and use of physical cards, and thus promoted the transactions of online products and services. Although such methods and some patented technologies can to a certain degree solve the payment problem in online transactions of electronic services and information resources and increase the convenience of electronic trading, the exchange process between the conventional currency and virtual currency (i.e., the process of charging an electronic business account) has not been improved and still uses remittance or cash method. With reference to FIG. 1, when a great amount of cash and remittance from multiple accounts (such as account 1, account 2, account 3, . . . , account N, and account N+1) needs to be handled and consequently multiple charging users (such as charging user 1, charging user 2, charging user 3, charging user N, . . . , and charging user N+1) respond to one processing platform, the company that provides virtual currency is unable to process payment messages from different charging users using different payment methods. Even if the company is able to process, there is serious waste of labor or hardware and software resources. All in all, the account charging process of the existing e-commerce is very inefficient with high costs, and does not effectively use the present network resources.
In the existing technology, a part of the e-commerce account charging process may first use a conventional currency to exchange for an electronic currency of an online bank, and then use the bank's electronic currency to exchange for an appointed virtual currency. However, because the public edition of online banking has low security and low maximum exchange limit, while the professional edition of online banking requires the client end to install digital certificates and has complicated activation and operation processes, and further because of the complicated procedures of the above-described charging process, the method is used by only very few Internet users and has not become popular.
The above-described limitations of the present technology also exists in the account charging process of online games, mobile communication, and fixed telephone communication, where the charging process similarly uses cash or remittance. The charging procedure is complicated and inefficient because only a small portion of the entire charging process is conducted over the Internet. Although the charging process of some online games and mobile communication may use online banking to charge an account, the online payment business is still seriously hindered by factors such as the low security of online banking, low maximum exchange limit, complicated activation and operation procedures, and the overall complexity of the account charging process.